Well, luckily, someone listed ‘zebra’ in an earlier post, which flagged me to use my browser’s ‘Find’ to jump to ‘zebra’ in Satan’s list. First time I ever found any use for that animal.
I think Satan is just trying to prove there are worse things than those who read fiction. . .i.e., those who play scrabble.
Maybe JWK could inform us as to how come there are so few native words in Modern English ending in ‘-a’, in spite of the fact there were “lots” in Old English, as he says. Were there generic shifts that substituted the '-a’s out, or what were the mechanisms – loss of tenses or declensions? An effect from the pronunciation of French?
‘Sea’, ‘lea’ ‘plea’ (well, originally Latin) ‘yea’ are four others in the ‘tea’, ‘pea’, ‘flea’ series. ‘Tea’, however, isn’t native English, of course. Like the tea itself, the English had to get the word from overseas.
I guess ‘ha’ and ‘aha’ (no etymology given in my dictionary) would be considered an international expression standardized by and from direct, uncoded neural reaction.
How ‘bout ‘gotta’, ‘lotta’, ‘hasta’, ‘wanna’, ‘gonna’, ‘gotcha’, ‘betcha’, mighta’, ‘woulda’, ‘coulda’, ‘shoulda’ ?
Ray